


Here I've Come to Hijack You

by rolameny



Series: Destiny fics [3]
Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Slow Burn, Xeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-20
Updated: 2018-06-20
Packaged: 2019-05-26 03:29:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14991785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rolameny/pseuds/rolameny
Summary: "Oh ho," says Cayde. "When's the wedding?"A romance in mutual theft.





	Here I've Come to Hijack You

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Tanya and Anna for cheerleading!
> 
> All the original characters in this fic also appear in [my other Destiny fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11938347/chapters/26987079), but it's not required to understand anything in this one.
> 
>  **Update, 09/04:** this fic and its sequel were written well before Forsaken and its lore reveals, so Mithrax's characterization and backstory aren't compliant with current canon. Think of this as an AU!

There's never enough light in the Arcology. Their way is lit only with some emergency signage and glitched-out billboards, Ghosts manifesting to give them enough light not to stumble over the little cleaning drones still making their rounds.

They're hunting down a reactor for Sloane so the platforms up top, at least, will get enough light.

Asaamu goes on ahead of the team, leaving Cix and Orha to clear out the terminals in the rooms behind. He volunteered, which was his first mistake, even with the Fallen crew to outrace for the reactor and his teammates trading looks all through the Arcology. There's been something in the air since the Traveler's rebirth and he wants no part of it, thank you.

He didn't mean to let the captain out, and he definitely didn't mean to get trapped himself.

"Pals,” he hisses into his mic pickup, "If you're done blowing your fuses, I could use some help down here.”

The captain hops off its ledge — Light above, it's barely got to flex its knees, tall as it is. Asaamu balances on his toes, gun in one hand and throwing knife in the other, in case the energy barrier around him decides to go down.

But it doesn't, and the captain pauses as its underlings stream towards the door, a black hole cut in the dim light of the room. Its secondary arms go back, its primaries holding a pair of shock-swords up — Asaamu doesn't let himself tense, holds himself in loose readiness — and it bows.

Asaamu stares, and the captain holds its position a long moment. Then it starts rising from the bow, and Asaamu does what Hunters are supposed to do, and makes a risky decision. He flips his gun back into its holster, uses his free hand to sweep back his cloak, and gives a bow he wouldn't be ashamed to present to the Queen of the Reef.

The captain tilts its head, brushing against the fur of that enormous ruff. Its secondaries twitch.

And it runs off out of the room, leaving Asaamu behind on his boxed-in ledge. The door shuts behind it.

Asaamu breaks his position to lean his side against the terminal. He breathes out, a wheeze loud inside his helmet.

Vega pops into physical being in front of him, the blue light of their appearance rippling over the shifting barrier.

"Now what was _that_ , 'Saamu,” she asks, her segments worried, pressed tight to her core.

Asaamu breathes in slow. He lets it out again before he answers, honestly: "Hell if I know.”

The lights go on overhead — all of them. It's the brightest he's seen any room in the Arcology, and it doesn't do the architecture any favours. The doors slide open at both ends of the room, and Cix and Orha appear in the doorway.

"Told you we'd find something interesting,” Cix says triumphantly, holding up a data solid. "Control keys for every room in this sector.”

"They only work with physical access to the individual rooms, though, so we'll just have to work as we go,” Orha adds, and then narrows their eyes. "Asaamu, why are you trapped in a box? What happened to that Fallen captain?”

Cix, behind them, taps at the security terminal, and the barrier shimmers away. Asaamu hops down before it can go back up — Traveler in orbit, that ledge goes up to his shoulder — and gestures at his fireteam in Vanguard handsign, _come on_.

"The captain happened,” he says, over his shoulder. "Its barrier went up, mine went down, it and all its little minions left. Thought it was going to try to get at me, but it just bowed and left.”

Orha's voice goes up in sharp bafflement. "It _bowed_? That makes no sense.”

Cix says, dry: "What, a bug can't be grateful when its ancestral enemy lets it go on ahead to get that nice big reactor all to itself?”

" _Ancestral_ ,” says Asaamu, and swears. "Ah, come on, we've got to catch it up.”

The three of them break into an easy run, following their Ghosts' directions. Asaamu hasn't seen Cix's more than a handful of times over the last few years, but Orha's Ghost, Nhour, spends most of her time physically (and audibly) present.

Nhour guides them through too many damp hallways narrow with Hive shit and servitors until, in the hallway before the reaction room, Asaamu hears roaring. He slows down and turns to his fireteam, points to the door and flips his hand palm-up: _what do you think that is?_

Cix shrugs and points three fingers at her forehead: _Hive?_ Then the gesture turns into a pair of horns over her head: _Knight?_

It does sound awfully Hive-like in there. Asaamu edges towards the door till it registers his presence and opens.

There's a Hive knight, and the captain from earlier, fighting. The captain's got the height advantage, but the knight has mass on it — in the beat Asaamu watches them, it drives the captain back, its single heavy sword overpowering the captain.

The captain lunges and gets a good slice in on the knight's torso, between two bone plates, but dances back again when the knight slams its sword against the captain's other sword, currently held in guard.

Asaamu frowns at them, and steps to the side to block Cix and the familiar click of her rocket launcher's safety unlatching. _Wait_ , he signs, a hand held flat out to his right, and pulls his throwing knife. A beat to judge — a breath, halved and halved again — the knight extends, side facing Asaamu, and there: he throws. The knife flies true to sink into, well, Asaamu would have to ask what organ it is, but it's one Hive don't do too well without, in his experience.

The knight jerks and roars, enough for the captain to close in and open its throat, shock swords sizzling against its green blood.

The captain turns to face him. It says something, Asaamu doesn't know what; he doesn't speak bug. It crosses its swords: one upright, one flat, looking like a salute to a fellow duelist. Then it breaks the pose, stoops to yank Asaamu's throwing knife out of the knight's corpse with a secondary arm, and returns to its salute, just in time for the blue light of transmat to take it.

Cix nudges her way out from behind Asaamu, and asks, "Was that your captain?”

"Sure was,” Asaamu says faintly, and then: "Wait, my _knife_!”

———-

Asaamu turns that day over in his mind, picking at it again and again like a loose thread in a cloak hem.

" _Talk_ to someone,” Vega urges him.

The new Tower, built into the City's wall, sprawls around them, construction noises and dust rising on the air. Asaamu lies on a piece of roof, half of it still tarp-covered and smelling of smoke.

"About what? A bug gave me a reactor and stole my knife? Not much to talk about, buddy. Aliens do weird things all the time.”

Vega gives an eyeroll in an elaborate, sarcastic swoop around his head. "You need to talk to someone because if you keep making that face I'm going to leave you and shack up with some striker with too many feelings.”

Asaamu lies back on his claimed patch of roof and drapes an arm over his face. "Alright, who? Who do we know who won't just pull a Sloane about it and say, _alright, neat anomaly but it's time to back to the war_?”

Vega settles themself down on Asaamu's belly, a dense warm weight. "Cayde, dummy. Or Rust.”

Asaamu lifts his free arm to point two fingers right at the sky. He ticks his points down, muffled through a mouthful of sleeve: "One, too busy with reconstruction, and two, she's been even squirrelier since the war started. She's never around.”

Vega sinks down a little further into his shirt, smug. "Oh, she's around. I've been keeping up with her Ghost, and they're on their way right now. Should be here in, hm, just a moment.”

Asaamu sits bolt up at that, dislodging his Ghost. He kneels and peers over the edge, down towards the bustle of cranes and concrete blocks along the sloping wall. And: yes, there's Rust a few storeys down, shaved head gleaming blue and silver, taking a ladder up the slow way.

"Hey, Warlock,” he calls down to her: "'Sup?”

She looks up and her default expression of a thoughtful frown turns itself right upside down. "Hunter! Find a good secret Tower hangout?”

"Always,” he says, and leans back to spread out his arms like a welcoming oligarch. "Up to half of my structurally unsound kingdom is yours.”

Rust kicks herself up rest of the ladder with her Light, and sinks down onto the roof cross-legged.

Rust's Ghost — never named by her, never picked a name himself, what a perfect pair of weirdos — pops into being by her ear.

"Hey there, Hunter, Vega,” he says cheerfully, and then, blinking that eye at his Warlock, "We're going to take this to my private office, alright, Rust?”

Rust smiles up at him. "Let me know when you two need the drinks service.”

And the Ghosts drift off to — Asaamu tracks their movement to a crane hanging above them, a good vantage point for them to keep an eye on their Guardians and settle down to what will probably be a serious gossip. Some Guardians underestimate the speed and power of the Ghost rumour network, but Asaamu never will, not with Vega around.

Asaamu eyes Rust's head and reaches for his own hair. It's gotten mussed in its tail from laying down, so he pulls out the tie to finger-comb it out. His dark hair reaches most of the way down his back when it's loose, and spills over his shoulder now.

Rust eyes him right back with a _You think you're subtle_ look and settles back to lean on her hands. She's holding herself relaxed, but there's deep purple bruises in the hollows under her eyes, the kind signalling weariness a Ghost can't wipe away. 

"So,” she says. "In the best tradition of our superiors, Vega was both urgent and vague. What's happened, and which of the library's volumes on the Eliksni will you want to consult today?”

She reaches for an inside pocket and pulls out a slate, its green _storage full_ indicator blinking.

Asaamu grimaces, and recites the whole thing over for Rust.

During the telling, her eyes flicker from him to his Ghost and back. After, she asks:

"What colour was his tabard?”

"Dusk purple, and with that same new symbol. Honestly looked like a dozen other captains I've helped take down since they burned all their individual House colours.”

Rust frowns. "Well. They're not a hive mind like the Vex. They've got dozens of languages, you know? And the spread doesn't map exactly onto the old Houses. They mostly use one of the House of Kings dialects between houses, but you should hear Kay go on about Devils vowel shifts and intercomprehensibility.”

Asaamu ties up his ponytail and flips it back over his shoulder. He rolls one wrist out to Rust and says, "And all this means... what?”

She shrugs. "Sounds like he made a snap decision, just like you. No political or strategic reason behind it, just an individual's personal whim. Congratulations — you've met an Eliksni as weird as you are.”

Frustrating, but he makes himself scoff. "Now there's the scalpel calling the razor sharp.”

Rust's lips twitch up. "Anything else, 'Saamu?”

Asaamu lets himself flop dramatically sideways onto Rust's thigh. Her long-tailed coat smells a little sour, like she's been to Venus recently and had an unintended dip in its swamps.

"Just thinking about, you know, what it means when an entire species is at war with another. Think I killed nearly half of that captain's crew in the Arcology.”

Rust's hand drops to sit on Asaamu's head, and she cards her fingers through his ponytail. He'll need to fix it again after, but it feels nice.

"You never ask the small things, do you?"

She's silent for a long minute, and they watch a crane swing heavily around to a work crew with a load of rebar. There's a bright red pennant tacked to the crane operator's booth, all the way at the top, and it snaps in the wind.

Finally, she says, "It means that if it continues, it'll end badly for at least one of us, and even if the other survives, it will be poorer for it, because the galaxy will be diminished, and all its inhabitants with it."

Asaamu rolls over to look her accusingly in the eye. "That's grim as all hell, Rust!"

She raises her fine white eyebrows at him. "You want the inspirational version, go find Cix."

He frowns. "You think it's inevitable, then?"

Rust tips her head back to catch the sun. "Isn't now, not with the Eliksni. Might be later if none of us find a way to stop. That could be reason enough to go find your captain again. A wedge in the door."

"' _My_ ' captain," he mutters, under his breath. Then, louder: "How would I find him anyway? One raiding captain in the whole solar system is a little too _needle in a haystack_ for my tastes."

She drums three fingers against the crown of his head. "Talk to your Vanguard, 'Saamu. Have you heard that story of him and the Baroness? He knows more about the Eliksni than he lets on."

Vega, who has clearly been listening in this whole time, calls out to him on their private channel, smug: _Told you so._

Asaamu sticks his arms up to dislodge Rust's hand from his hair (and flash Vega one of the ruder words of Vanguard handsign), and then drops them backwards onto the rest of her lap not occupied by his head.

"Ugh, fine, I'll talk to him," he concedes. "But before I do, now that I've lured you into actually talking to someone: what's been up with you? Not even Orha knows what the hell happened to you since the war started."

"Nothing as interesting as you," she says, but there's something wary in her eyes, in the set of her shoulders, and those dark circles distorting her face tattoos still worry him. So he reaches up to shake her skull, very gently, and says,

"You're gonna tell me, and then we're gonna go buy some persilemon candies and go drop them on Orha and Cix from the roof, because they're extremely boring and haven't changed their date night plans since that one pub reopened three months ago and they need something to spice it up."

What a world, that he's got to cheer Rust up.

But she does smile.

———-

Asaamu doesn't talk to Cayde-6. He goes back on patrol, riding along with a pair of Warlocks he knows who specialize in early Golden Age artifacts and who need a third. They show him around the Manhattan nuclear zone, and he keeps an eye on their six for the Hive who've made a breeding grounds out of the old subway tunnels. He goes down once, from a boomer-shot at close range to the gut. He determinedly pays attention to the discussions of 23rd century power sources and doesn't think at all about the moral problem of going to war with an entire species of sentients who've lost their homeworld. It's a good break.

When his rotation's end brings him back to the Tower for debrief and the chance to barter the few artifacts he picked up (nothing new, but the Cryptarchs should want some of the components, he thinks), Cayde sends for him.

Cayde's tucked himself away in the back of one of the secondary hangars, leg dangling over the side of a jumpship trussed up for repairs. He's got a double-width slate propped in his lap, the reverse side showing some building's blueprints.

"Hey, Hunter," he calls out, and Asaamu calls back: "Hey, boss."

He tosses up a data solid with his latest report on it, and follows up himself as Cayde fits the solid into his slate's intake groove.

Asaamu swings himself to sit next to Cayde, and draws something else out of his cloak — a bottle.

"Oh ho," says Cayde, looking at it. "That kind of debrief, huh?"

Asaamu grimaces. "Figured the rumour mill's been grinding away long enough for its material to ferment, so why shouldn't we. What have you heard?"

"From your extended fireteam, not much — from my Ghost? An earful. When's the wedding?"

The bottle makes a solid thump set down against the ship's hull. Asaamu opens it with the edge of one armoured knuckle and passes it over before he tells the whole story over again for what feels like the thirtieth time. The Ghosts have made a mountain again out of a weird but tiny molehill. He should've just talked to Cayde when he got back from Titan.

A lot of exos Asaamu knows only bother controlling their expressions around other exos, on the principle that most humans and Awoken don't get enough exposure to read them. As far as Asaamu can tell, Cayde never stops controlling his. His eyelights dim and flare at moments to suggest that his whole interest in the story is for some particularly juicy gossip.

Cayde hums a moment after taking a drink, and passes the bottle back when Asaamu finishes his report. Asaamu sighs and drinks.

Cayde has plenty of followup questions, making Asaamu dig back in his memory for the precise size of the Fallen squad, its makeup, how far into limb regrowth its dregs were. Then he steals the bottle back and asks,

"D'you have a recording of whatever he said to you?" His eyelights flicker with what could be simple curiosity.

Asaamu looks up and to his left, to where Vega usually likes to hover by his shoulder. "Do we?"

Vega descends. "Sure do! I didn't catch any video, but I saved the audio from that part with the Knight." 

They play it. Cayde tilts his head just a bit as that voice echoes out from Vega's speakers, thin in the huge hangar.

"Well, he's thanking you, or at least giving you the Eliksni version, which means he's telling you you're even. And giving his name in a pretty old-fashioned style. This big fella you've run into, he calls himself Mithrax the— hm. Alone? Deserted? Forsaken. Nobody by that name in our records, which means either he's stayed well out of our territory till now or he changed it lately. Grim name, maybe he split off from a House or his Baron's ketch and took it. ...Say, was this little speech before or after he took your knife?"

Asaamu has to think about it. "Before," he says finally. "Bowed, said his piece, took the knife, transmatted out."

Cayde's eyes flare high at that. "Well hey!" he says. "Looks like you've got an admirer!"

He pulls Asaamu in, draping a heavy arm over his shoulders. "Ever hear of that old trick — forget something at your sweetie's house to have a reason to go back? Our pal Mithrax isn't too shy to give you a reason."

Asaamu carefully doesn't tense up. "The romance joke is getting a little long in the tooth, boss."

Heat whirs its way out from Cayde's abdominal vents. "Sometimes," he says, with the tone of someone imparting a treasured piece of wisdom, "A joke that goes too far goes _just far enough._ "

He pulls away, and says, tone firming: "I want you back on Titan, Asaamu. I'm seconding you to Sloane; she'll find you assignments. I want you useful, visible, and mostly not too lethal to Eliksni if you don't have to be. Who knows what this guy Mithrax really wants, but taking that knife after declaring you two evensies stevensies means something, and we're not doing so well we can afford not to pursue a lead. Capisce?"

Asaamu blows out a sigh, turning it into a whistle halfway through. He gives a loose imitation of a Titan salute and tips the bottle to Cayde. "Sure thing, boss. Now d'you want to give me something useful? Context clues? A hint? Whatever that story with the Baroness is?"

Cayde takes a drink and eyes him sidelong, tapping idly on the rim of the bottle, making it ring. "Which version have you heard?"

"Got it from the exo Warlock on my fireteam, who heard it from their Ghost."

Cayde squints. "Then the version you heard… it'd be. Uh. No, not that one, not that either — oh, yeah, told that frame barkeep that one. Yeah, alright, not too far off, but I'll give you the skinny. But just between you, me, and your bug boy; got it, Skinny?"

Asaamu holds out a hand and Cayde slaps the bottle into it. "You got it, boss."

———-

Titan is cold, wet, windy, and smelly. The methane sea under the Arcology platforms doesn't have a smell, but the omnipresent algae does, and it smears all too easy onto Asaamu's gauntlets.

He settles the folds of his cloak out of the way of his arms and reaches for his toolkit. Another solar array to tune means crouching in clear sight of anyone to the east and south, only hidden from the north by the paneling's curve. It's too exposed; his shoulder blades itch.

Sloane had assigned him to this tech work, only rated as Guardian assignment because they didn't want to set up the safety harnesses a mortal worker would need to climb the slippery arrays. The breeze in her commander's eyrie had ruffled her steel-grey hair as she'd given him the list of duties that would keep him visible to any Fallen eyes.

"I don't care for the risk, and I don't see how dangling yourself like bait on a hook is supposed to get us intel," she'd said, and crossed her arms, the medals dangling from her pauldron chiming. "But that's a Vanguard call, and we're here to follow orders, Guardian. All clear?"

Asaamu had grinned, bounced twice on his toes — he wasn't meant for whatever funk had seized him, he'd fake his normal attitude till he made his way back to it — and said, "Aye aye, Captain, or whatever it is they say. Where do you keep the repair kits around here?"

She'd directed him to the right locker, and here he was, three standard days later, still tooling around with the crest on his cloak feeling more like a target than anything else.

Orha and Cix are around somewhere running patrols deeper in the Arcology, and Rust with them. The circles under her eyes are barely lighter this week, but the company'd do her good, probably.

Company would do Asaamu good right now. His fireteam had only come up once to check in and dump bags of weird shit folks back on the Tower had asked for, Hive chitin and mutated alkane and who knows what else. And now they're back in the dim glitchy light of a dead city and he's above them on rusting platforms, replacing dead solar panel scales with fresh ones from a Golden Age sticker kit, waiting for some Fallen to ask for another knife or put one in his back.

"Jilted by a bug who stole my knife — sounds like a song, hey, Vega?"

Manifested but hiding in one of his pockets, Vega rolls over to poke a corner against his hipbone. "Dare you to write it and sing it at the next party."

Asaamu thinks about it, whistling tunes through his teeth. He's picking at a stubborn patch of solar scale with his knife (his spare, thanks, with his third through eleventh backups tucked away in his armour, and the rest in his jumpship, close enough for Vega to transmat them down to him with a minute's warning) when the white glare and sonic-boom rumble of a skiff dropping to sublight speed nearby almost knocks him off the array.

Sloane's proximity alarm goes off a moment later, too late to be of any use to him. Asaamu blinks the dazzle out of his eyes and peers around — there's a crew in Dusk colours dropping down to a platform nearby, landing soft as cats on their clawed feet. The comm in Asaamu's helmet comes to life with a click:

"You're our closest eyes on the ground, Hunter. What are those Fallen up to?" Sloane, terse as usual.

Asaamu pulls out a loose rifle scope from his pocket, one with a broken mount he keeps meaning to fix but hasn't gotten around to yet. He juggles it to get the right end pointing out and squints down its length.

"Can't tell just yet, but it looks like just another salvage crew — oh, no, here comes a servitor, one of those mid-size ones: must be an ether-gathering op."

"Hm. I've got two Guardians nearby. They'll be there in under a minute. Wait for them, and disable whatever the Fallen are up to."

Sloane's sign-off is interrupted with a crackle — Titan's equinox is coming up soon, and the winds are getting strong enough to interfere with their more delicate equipment.

It's a long minute waiting and watching, half the Fallen scurrying out to secure the area and the rest waiting for some humpbacked device to finish transmatting in from their skiff. The moment it's done, they pull out rivet guns to attach it securely to the decking. It's big, tall as the dregs on the crew would be if they stood up straight.

"Weird equipment," Vega murmurs, tapped into his helmet visuals."Look at that display — I'd love to get a solid crack at their software one of these days."

Then the crew opens up the thing's round back and starts pulling out cable, yards and yards of it. They drag one end into a doorway Asaamu can't see into, and pretty soon after that, the machine and servitor both start glowing with a warm white light.

Asaamu eases one hand over Vega's pocket. "Ether conversion? What kind of stuff does this place even have to convert?"

"Algae?" Vega hazards. Asaamu takes another look through his detached scope. The smear of green on the decking by that door is going dry and grey, the colour leaking out of it. Part of it flakes off and blows across the floor and over the safety rail as he watches.

"Good guess," he says, as his radio clicks back on and another voice says, breathless, "Hi, we're here, what's up?"

Asaamu looks down: far below, on the platform's floor, is the pair of Guardians Sloane mentioned. Riding double on one sparrow, its tail almost dragging against the ground till they hop off, a Titan and a Hunter.

The Titan looks up and salutes, painfully earnest. The Hunter just waves two fingers, not nearly as insouciant as they think they are.

"Olivine-9 and Mehdi Aran, sir." Asaamu knows those names: a pair of kids, barely older than the Red War, but they did alright for themselves in that last fight to take back the City. Earned a minor commendation from Zavala himself, he thinks. He hops down from his perch and lands light on the balls of his feet in front of them.

Just for kicks, he sweeps out his cloak for them. "Asaamu," he says. "We've got some Fallen trying to pull all the life out of our algae or however it is they make ether. We're going to shut them down."

He eyes them over. "Aran, we'll go in around the corner, try to disable that machine or cut its cord, whatever you can think of; Olivine, you go straight in, make like a Titan, and smash, alright?"

It goes pretty well at first. Olivine's got that Titan trick of making her whole body into a cannonball, and she bowls over all the Fallen in her way and even knocks a dent into that funny machine as she comes to a rest against it. Aran dips quick into that room where they've got the end of the cable and three hisses, like Fallen bodies releasing their ether, emerge one after another.

And Asaamu takes aim at that servitor, trying to crack its faceplate. He gets off a solid three shots before it turns to face him, flares bright and purple, and makes that weird inverted noise that means it's going to try for a short-distance transmat. The world goes blurry and white around Asaamu, and he feels a pull upwards — he braces for a fall into the hydrocarbon sea below. _Ah, fuck_.

When the world cross-dissolves back into focus front of him, though, his feet are solid on some kind of curving ground, and the light is dim and warm.

His grip tightens on his gun and knife, and in front of him a figure rises, silhouetted in the gloom. Tall, gangling, top-heavy — his secondaries come out and Asaamu's hands relax. A captain. Risky strategy, isolating a Guardian in a skiff with its captain, but maybe they think he can't take one. His main hands are empty, a pair of shock swords strapped to its waist, hanging unlit.

(He can. He definitely can. Even alone in a dark, unfamiliar environment. Right?)

Then Asaamu spots what this captain's done to the gauntlet on his left secondary. Instead of a metal claw bolted onto the base, there's a Hunter knife hammered roughly into a curve, secured to the gauntlet with leather straps running through the holes milled into its handle and blade. Holes _Asaamu_ had milled, getting the weight and balance just right for throwing.

Asaamu should probably try for diplomacy, working off Rust or Cayde's advice, but instead what comes out of his mouth is, "That's _my_ knife! You _stole my knife!_ "

The captain sinks back a bit, getting his eye level down to Asaamu's. He flexes the thick fingers of his primary hands, gazes at Asaamu, and says, low and grumbly but perfectly understandable, "It was… trade. My knife, now."

Most of Asaamu goes into shock, hearing human language from a Fallen, but he's never had trouble letting his mouth run ahead of his brain, and he replies, "The trade was the reactor for that knight — you don't get to take my stuff as a souvenir!"

The captain looks down at his hand, with Asaamu's poor bent knife tied to it, then back up. He folds his secondary arms against his long torso. The edges of the knife catch the light.

"Should not leave knives to become souvenirs, _o ha_ ," the captain says.

The noise Asaamu makes at that isn't a word in his or the captain's language. Vega nudges at him from inside his pocket, reminding him. 

"Is your name really Mithrax? Why am I here?" and then, even though he knows he should have more patience, bursts out, "How can you understand me now?"

The captain crouches down on his haunches, casual. One arm goes out to gesture, _you too_. Asaamu eyes him, but holsters his gun and kneels. He keeps his knife — his current knife — in his hand, and lets the other hang loose, open, ready to summon a ball of arc Light. There's a distant crackle in his helmet comm, but he shuts that out.

Those four bright eyes watch him, tracking his movements. They gleam in the dark of the skiff, not reflective like the eyes of a cat or Awoken, but lit from within. Like an exo running low on power. They make him think of Orha sleepy on the roof of Hawthorne's decrepit barn.

The captain says, eventually: "Yes. Mithrax. Was… questioned how a thief of the Great Machine came to act generously towards Eliksni. Had help with language from navigator engine."

_Navigator engine?_

Vega asks in his ear, _Fallen use really big servitors to steer their ships, right?_

The awareness of the rest of the ship behind him makes his neck prickle. Is there a servitor behind him, hanging in a frame, waiting to turn its eye on him? He can't turn around to look now.

And it would definitely be a bad idea to admit that he'd only acted _generously_ the first time because he didn't know enough about Golden Age security protocols. He shrugs. "The Hive rank a little higher on my personal list of nasties. And… you bowed. It's not just the Fallen who get curious about things."

Those backlit eyes narrow at him. Mithrax's fur mantle shivers, and the long crescent horns coming out of it twitch. "Eliksni. Not Fallen."

Asaamu tries for an amiable shrug. "Alright, Eliksni. I probably don't want to hear the things you all call humans."

Mithrax laughs, and it sounds like a cough or a growl. "Probably not."

Asaamu's just about ready to believe that this isn't an ambush, that this guy just has the instincts of a very tall, very spiky anthropologist. That thought feels strange to hold in his mind. Do the Eliksni have libraries of alien literature, too, and what conclusions have they come to about humans because of it?

The crackle in his comm resolves into speech. Aran's voice, faint but clearly frantic. "—nter Asaamu, come in, where are you? Are you dead? Where did he go—?"

Quickly, Asaamu thinks to Vega, _mute my helmet please —_ and replies, "Aran, calm down. The servitor dumped me way up high, barely in relay reach. I'm fine, I'll be down soon, what's your status?"

Mithrax shifts and cocks his head in front of him. On the comm, Aran answers, "We're fine down here, the Fallen scattered as soon as we noticed you were gone. What should we do with their ether machine? They just abandoned it."

"Prefer your crew to leave it," Mithrax says, voice quiet. "Components difficult to manufacture."

Asaamu jerks back in surprise. "You can hear that?"

Mithrax inclines his head; in his ear, Aran says, "Of course I can hear you, can you hear me?"

"Don't touch anything, I'll be down soon as I can," says Asaamu hurriedly, and closes the radio connection. He looks at Mithrax.

Mithrax gazes back steadily. After a long pause, he says, "We… I. I have caused your crew to worry."

"They're kids, that's what they're for," Asaamu says, hearing himself talk without any input from his brain.

"Still," says Mithrax, the tectonic rumble of his voice sounding thoughtful. He rises from his crouch, slowly, and extends a hand towards him. Asaamu follows a beat later, almost surprised to still find his knife in his hand.

"I have fed curiosity enough today, _o ha_ ," he says. "We will return you to your crew."

From behind him comes that backwards gulping hum, deeper this time. The inside of the skiff brightens with the white-purple light of the enormous servitor that is definitely behind them, and the light catches against Mithrax's armour, the gold paint on his tabard, the basket hilts of the paired swords on his hips.

Moving ahead of thought, as the skiff goes vague around him, Asaamu lunges forward to pull one of those swords from its sheath. The world solidifies back into the pale breezy damp of the platform, scuffed with burn marks and blood now. He's still in full extension, probably looking like he got transmatted back in the middle of a duel. 

From behind him, Olivine says, tentatively, "...Hunter?"

Asaamu's teeth are bared under his helmet, triumphant.

———-

Sloane locks him in her private meeting room to debrief with not just Cayde-6 but the whole Vanguard. It's really hard to concentrate on anything with the weight of all their gaze bearing down on him, much less give an account for his reasoning behind all his decisions during his latest meeting with Mithrax. Asaamu doesn't know if he'd done any reasoning. They grill him for more than an hour all told.

But Cayde pulls for him, and while Zavala seems skeptical, Ikora, leaning over Cayde's shoulder to peer at the shock sword glowing orange in the holoprojector, says, "I say we give him some time. It's not the strategy I'd have planned, but it seems to have worked so far — leave room for personal taste, hm?"

Zavala settles back in his seat, arms folded. His eyes gleam in the projector's light, and they shift to turn on Ikora. "How many of your Hidden do you have right now on Titan, Ikora?"

Ikora smiles and doesn't say anything. Cayde ducks his head to look at her, and then back to Asaamu. "So what we're saying is: good job on leaving enough mystery in the relationship, kid. Keep it up — get whatever intelligence you can, but only if you can do it without losing this guy's trust. We good?"

Asaamu sighs. "We good, boss." He gives a Hunter gesture of acknowledgment, then turns it hastily into a more precise salute. "Bosses."

"Guardian," says Zavala, and pauses. "As always: be brave."

The screen winks off. Asaamu slumps to press his forehead to the cool brushed steel of the table, and shoves his hands into his hair. Vega, behind him, floats over to settle down on top of his head.

"You're very heavy," he says, muffled.

"Your boots weigh more than I do, you big bully," they say cheerfully, and then they start humming that note they always make when they've got to repair one of Asaamu's trickier organs. It's very soothing, and they stay like that, a little pile of Guardian and Ghost and incongruous sword in front of the shut-off camera, until Sloane comes back in to chase them out.

———-

The shock sword's weight takes some time to get used to. Asaamu is tall as humans go, but the thing is just too long for his legs when he straps it to his waist. Eventually he flips his cloak aside and slings it over his shoulder. It's useful — always good to have another blade on him, and he uses it to jumpstart an old drone he finds in a weather monitoring station.

When he peers out the station's round window, he catches a glint from far down, coming from a dim Hive shit-crusted doorway out on one of the pumps. Asaamu ducks back in and reaches for his scope, then peers carefully out again.

The light he spotted is from a pair of Fallen — of Eliksni, eyes and wire-rifle bores electric blue. When he eases himself out the door and down the ladder, they don't move or shoot; they just keep watching.

That pattern repeats itself for the next three days, as the winds rise and the equinox catches up to them. His fireteam's rotation comes up and they head back to Earth with their jumpships' cargo holds stuffed with their finds. Asaamu watches them check the straps on all the crates and toss in some more last-minute junk — Orha's found a spelunking suit in the Arcology and they keep running their hands over the seams like they're already making alterations to it in their mind.

Orha and Cix make their goodbyes together, Orha making vague threats on his behalf and Cix cheerfully wishing him well, then head off towards their ships, hips bumping. Rust finds him on the landing platform railing as the two ships start to rise into the air and balances next to him, leaning into his shoulder.

In the quiet after the ships' takeoff, fingers tapping her helmet between its tall horns where it's slung on her knee, she says, "You'll know what to do."

Asaamu thumps his head sideways against hers. His ear pinches between his skull and hers. "Of course I will."

She hears the sarcasm he doesn't let into his voice, and adds firmly, "Walk upright and the roof will stretch higher for you, 'Saamu."

He snorts. "Is that from your publishing debut? _Aphorisms to Exasperate Hunters_?"

"It's not fun if you make me explain myself," she says. She hooks her fingers into the chin-piece of her helmet and hops off the railing, then knocks a knuckle into his pauldron. "Treat him like a person and not a chess piece. Treat him… treat him like he's a Guardian you got a crush on at the bar again, alright?"

Then she's gone in a rustle of void Light, the hatch of her jumpship swinging shut. "Blinking to make sure you get the last word in has got to be cheating," Asaamu says to the air.

"She's practically a Hunter sometimes," Vega says approvingly. "Come on, buddy. Those weather stations won't repair themselves, and I want to check out how those Golden Age engineers encoded ethane density."

———-

Back to the grind. More Eliksni stare at him, and more openly, now. It's unnerving enough that he decides to interpret his orders with a little creativity and spend a quiet day scouting out the Arcology.

Asaamu slips into the its massive entrance hall quietly, easing himself from construction girders to fifteenth-floor balcony guardrails. He drops down onto the balcony itself, his boots not thumping onto solid flooring but sinking into a foot of plant matter gone damp and green-black with age. The equinox is here: Titan's winds scream through the holes broken in the dome. They rattle at loose pieces of glass and accreted Hive shit, and as he watches one panel falls to smash against the moss-stained tiles far below.

There's one small squad of Eliksni in the entryway, its members all sized about average for low- to mid-rank foot soldiers. Their secondary arms are all grown back clear past the elbows — whoever's in charge of their ether rationing, captain or archon, they've got an even hand. Asaamu can't hear them over the noise of the storm, they shouldn't be able to hear him, and if he stays low they'll have no reason to look up and spot him. Safe enough.

He skulks in his best Hunterly fashion through the door to what turns out to be a bedroom, sidesteps a bed and armchair heaped with clothes shrouded in dust. If he's learned right from spending a whole rotation running tech support for Sloane, there should be a fuse box by the apartment's main doorway, and getting into that should give him access to the janitorial consoles that stand in the hallways, one for every three floors, and that should buy him a pass into every pathway this residential block's computer system has.

He's right. Asaamu restrains his celebrations to a silent hand-waggle at the console as its permissions blossom open before him.

Asaamu hooks up a solid to get a dump of the entire security system's archive. While that gets going, he keys permissions to every door in the block to a physical card, so Vega won't have to go hacking individual locks and anybody trying to stroll in behind him will have a harder time of it.

"I'm getting pretty good at this,” he tells Vega, peeping out from a fold in his cloak. "Time for the interesting stuff?”

" _Finally_ ," they say, joking; Asaamu rolls his eyes, but as he eases into a silent jog, he reaches back to give Vega a pat.

They follow a group of Eliksni advance scouts, staying well behind and above of them. The scouts keep firm grips on their shock spears, the little cloud of shanks surrounding them darting off and back again to take looks into other rooms along their route. 

Asaamu recognizes the passageway they're going through now, a long hall with just one entrance and one exit; not his favourite kind of architecture. _Let's go around_ , he tells Vega — they can catch up to the scouts further up if they take the vents.

He's narrow enough for the vents, but he's way too long, and his cloak keeps fouling his knees. Frustration keeps him from noticing the odd noises till Vega dematerializes from his shoulder with a pop of air.

 _Listen up, 'Saamu. Something big's down there_.

There shouldn't be anything down _there_ other than a tiny park full of trees in desperate need of a pruning. But still, the vent itself is trembling, and there's a roar echoing oddly around his ears.

Then a blast of heat rips diagonally across the vent from below. Asaamu tumbles out through a hole with edges glowing white, covering his head, calves burning as they graze metal.

He lands mostly upright in a leaf-clogged fountain ten yards in front of an ogre, runty as they go, but Light in the heliopause, that's not saying much. Jittery blue to his right: a Fallen captain's arc-powered shield, low on juice. Asaamu double-takes — that's _Mithrax_ , obvious from the patch of gold on his thigh plating and the way he holds his arms. There's a vandal at his feet — no, correction: there's a vandal's corpse at his feet, and Mithrax is absolutely incandescent with rage. He's got one sword at his waist and he's carrying one of those big Eliksni guns, the ones that shoot shards of half-melted shrapnel.

He roars at the ogre, scoops up his dead subordinate's spear, and throws it at the ogre. Nails him right in the shoulder joint, and the spear's arc charge crackles over the ogre's head.

It pisses the ogre off. Its eyes, or whatever it's got under that horrible expanse of skin on its forehead, start glowing white, building up to another blast. And Mithrax's arc shield is sputtering out in spots — it can't take another hit like the last.

Asaamu lets the arc of his own innate Light build up, forming a pair of long, jagged knives in his hands. He takes two running steps to build momentum, and goes the rest of the way flickering to the left and right, too quick for anyone to track. He plants a foot right in front of the ogre, current filling him up, spilling off his blades. He springs upwards, and as the ogre's forehead starts to spit out its next blast, he stabs both knives straight through its head, and discharges all the arc Light in his body.

The explosion immolates the ogre. Unfortunately, it immolates him too.

In the dim awareness that's all he retains when he's dead, Asaamu feels Vega's worry and pride. Working up to a res takes a while without another Guardian's Light there for a Ghost to bounce off of, so Asaamu settles back into that close dark.

The first thing he sees when he comes back in a thunderstorm of Light is Mithrax's face, leaning in way too close. The first thing he feels is the arc Light of his resurrection reacting to the presence of Mithrax's arc shield woven into the same space it's trying to use, and the shield popping and blowing the both of them backwards onto their asses.

Asaamu sits there stunned and shuddering at the feel of Mithrax's charge merged with his Light, rattling around his bones till it finishes grounding itself. He reaches blindly to gather Vega into his palms and blinks to clear his head.

When he looks up, Mithrax is kneeling and gazing back at him, eyes burning. "You died," he says, voice growling deeper than Asaamu's heard from him yet. "You died for me?"

"Looks like," Asaamu says faintly. "I can get away with it as a repeat trick, you know. As far as I know, you can't."

Mithrax's clawed hands flex, all four of them. "A gift. I had forgotten the taste of that honour."

He stands abruptly, and reaches one of his primary hands down to Asaamu. Asaamu tucks Vega away into the cloth folds at his shoulder and accepts it.

Mithrax's hand is huge and heavy against Asaamu's, his forearm lean with ropy strength. Asaamu isn't braced well enough for it, or the balance of his body, weighted so differently than a human's. Asaamu rises and stumbles forward to thump against his chest, his head barely reaching higher than Mithrax's lower pair of arms.

They hang there for a moment, a breath. Then Mithrax's secondary arms come up to catch at the sides of Asaamu's chestplate. They push him away a step, gentle and unyielding. 

"There," Mithrax rumbles. The fire in his eyes is banked now, not gone but quiet. "Stand on your own power, _o ze_."

They stand there, Mithrax's arms slowly lowering. Then they come back up, just an inch. "Do… if I may ask for another gift. Do you have a name you would share with Mithrax?"

"Oh," says Asaamu. "Of course — no problem. Nice to meet you, I guess. I'm Asaamu."

Mithrax leans back like he's digesting the syllables. He nods. Then he bends down to pull the shock pistol from the vandal's corpse and rearrange its limbs more neatly.

"Young Tak. We will return for him," Mithrax says. Then he adds something in Eliksni directed to the vandal. Asaamu tries not to shift his weight too awkwardly.

He looks around for the exit and doesn't spot it. Under his helmet, he frowns, and Vega silently layers the blueprints for this section of the Arcology over his view through his HUD. The gap in the wireframe where the door should be is covered by several tons of rubble and smouldering trunks, courtesy of the ogre's bad aim.

Asaamu turns in a slow circle. The blocked door's the only entrance and the vents are a no-go unless Mithrax is a lot skinnier than he looks under that bundle of fur and cape. He looks up.

The same blast that tore open the vents has also ripped open a long slice of the park's arched ceiling, and one of the Arcology's upper floors is visible above. If they can get on top of the vents, they'll be able to boost themselves up through the ceiling.

He catches Mithrax's eye and gestures up. "Would you be able to get up there, do you think?"

Mithrax crosses both pairs of his arms. He studies the ragged-edged hole. "Not unless you have rope," he says.

"I ought to," says Asaamu, and pats down his pants pockets. No, not there — he checks the side pockets of his chest armour, the compartments in his gauntlets, down the side of his boots. The long pocket hidden along the hem of his cloak — no, not even there, and now his gloves are wet from the soaking his cloak got in the fountain.

"Huh," he says. "Guess it's still in the ship. Vega?"

Vega floats on out of his lowered hood and shutters their eye. Their back half rotates slow in concentration. Then they say, "Sorry, 'Saamu. Storm got real bad out there. Too much atmospheric interference right now."

Mithrax cocks his head and growls a few syllables in Eliksni. He waits, and speaks again. At last he says, frustrated, "The winds have knocked out our communications."

" _That_ bad?" Asaamu asks, but when he tries his own, he doesn't get anything back but a static hissing. "Huh. Looks like we're on our own for now."

The three of them survey the park. The long gash in the roof is directly under the fountain at the north edge of the park, with no trees near enough to climb. The vent is torn nearly in half, held together with one creaking strip of metal the ogre's blast missed.

"I have an idea," Mithrax says. "You will want to stand back."

He backtracks to scoop his shrapnel launcher from the ground and aims it at the vents. Catching on, Asaamu scoots back. Far back. Back behind Mithrax.

Mithrax's aim is good: three shots, probably as precise as it's possible to be with one of those launchers, put a hole through that last strip. Groaning, the two halves of the vents tear themselves apart. The shorter end swings down to crash into the wall, and the longer end falls with an equally loud noise into the fountain, sending a wave of dark water over the edge and across the floor to lap at their feet. The far end of the vent is still attached to the wall it's running through, and the length of it makes a perfect ramp up to the gouge in the ceiling. It'll be a jump for Asaamu from that ramp, but Mithrax should be able to reach the edge and pull himself up just by standing fully upright.

Asaamu whistles a rising three notes, impressed. "Speaker's mask, that was good thinking. I was trying to figure out how to make some kind of ladder from all these trees."

Then, at Mithrax's surprisingly human _you first_ motion, he says, "No, no, you're heavier, you'd better go first in case it collapses after the first trial. I can probably make that jump without the ramp, but you can't."

Mithrax tips his head to the side. "A good point. I will be quick, then."

He slings the shrapnel launcher into a holster on his back. Mithrax has to step into the fountain to get on top of the vent, and when he does, his lower arms go tight in to his sides in an unhappy motion. Then he gets onto the thing and climbs it in a quick, fluid scramble, using every single one of his limbs. The vent ramp groans and begins to buckle, and Asaamu calls over hurriedly, 

"Make a jump for it!"

And Mithrax does, just in time: as he pushes off from the vent, ten feet down from the ceiling, its rivets snap. He hits the edge of the hole with all four arms and heaves himself up and forward onto the tiles of the upper floor.

He rolls over and pokes his head back through the hole to wave. Asaamu blows a sigh of relief and waves back.

Asaamu hops over onto the top of the vent, thoroughly crumpled now, and looks up to judge the distance. Not the hardest jump he's ever made, but usually he gets the benefit of a good runup first.

He crouches down and flings himself upwards with muscle and Light. Halfway through, before gravity can turn on him, he wills solidity into a patch of air under his feet and pushes himself up further.

Asaamu's aiming himself at a spot a few feet up from the edge of the hole itself, so he can catch himself easily and pull himself the rest of the way in. He's not prepared for a kneeling Mithrax to grab him and yank him in, hands clutching at his arms and torso. His momentum bowls them over, sending Mithrax over backwards and Asaamu sprawling on top of him, caught between his legs.

Mithrax's hands convulse on Asaamu, then he releases his grip. It takes a long moment for Asaamu to gather his wits and push himself up and off to the side, and as he does, Asaamu finds himself mourning the fact that his armour is too heavy to let any body heat in.

They sit there side by side catching their breath for longer than Asaamu, at least, should need to. Vega hums in his ear, and he twitches.

He's dehydrated, Asaamu decides. Guardians don't have to eat or drink very much, but that just means it's easier to forget, and he's probably been forgetting more often without his fireteam around.

"This had better not have been one very long con to get me vulnerable," he mutters as an aside more _at_ Mithrax than _to_ him, and pops his helmet off.

The air in this part of the Arcology is cool and damp, the purifiers tucked away into ceiling alcoves still humming along. The walls are curved, made of blue-tinted glass gone purple in the white-and-red emergency lighting. Asaamu looks around as he fishes for his water flask — it's not a big room, and the walls are lined with benches. There's one desk with a dead console tipped over on it. Some kind of waiting room, maybe.

Asaamu tips his head back to drink and winces as his braid, wrapped into a knot at the base of his neck, bumps into his cloak. After today's activities, it's stiff with drying sweat.

He remembers himself and turns to offer the flask to Mithrax. "Do you need some water? Food? I've probably got some jerky in a pocket somewhere."

Mithrax is staring at him, eyes narrow and glowing bright.

"Uh," says Asaamu.

Mithrax blinks hard and drops all the tension out of his shoulders all at once. His ruff sinks down, and he spreads his lower hands in what might be a rueful gesture.

"I had not known what you kept under your armour's shell," Mithrax says, voice low. He indicates Asaamu's hair. "You have made for yourself a horn?"

Asaamu's free hand goes up to touch his braid. "Just keeping it out of the way." He grimaces to feel it matted with salt and pulls the braid's tail out from the knot keeping it secured, and the rope of his hair falls heavy down his back.

He waves the flask again. "Water?"

"The ether will sustain me for now," Mithrax replies. He gathers his legs under him to squat, elbows braced on his thighs, cloak draped comfortably around him. "That is the word? For—" he taps at the canisters screwed into his faceplate "—this?"

Asaamu nods, screwing the flask shut and tucking it away. Both hands free, he reaches back to undo the tie in his braid and comb out his hair, working his way up from the bottom.

"Not sure why we call it that. Do you have a better translation?"

Mithrax shrugs. "We call it… life. That which lives. Our lives are small to start; we take other life to add to our own, so we live taller."

Asaamu can feel Vega in his mind, a sharp point of curiosity and focus. Good thing someone here's paying attention — they can cover for him on his next debrief.

"Taking other life?" they prompt.

"If it can be taken and kept, it always belonged to you," Mithrax says, with the tone of someone explaining that water is, actually, wet. He runs a hand over Asaamu's knife strapped to his gauntlet. "That is strength. If it is taken from you, it was never yours."

Asaamu bites his tongue against his first reaction, _that's dark as hell_ , and then harder against his second, _thanks for keeping this sword around for me till I picked it up, then_. He glances to the side and catches Mithrax's eyes fixed, unexpectedly, on his hands moving through his hair as he rebraids it. 

He looks away again and ties the braid off. "Does converting life to ether always kill whatever you're converting?"

"No." Mithrax shifts his weight on his feet. Every movement he makes ripples down his whole body, lower arms reflecting and accenting the motions of his upper pair. There's a sense of patient strength to him like this, a coiled power content to wait for the moment it's needed. Asaamu ducks his head and busies himself twisting his braid back up on itself into a knot.

Mithrax goes on, "If our power grew slow and patient, and we claimed this dome's greater forest, it could host all of my old House with no harm to it. But the Eliksni lost stillness in the Whirlwind, along with the Great Machine. Now our power is in the quick claiming, the sudden devouring. Many storage tanks on a ketch, but no room for forests."

"Seems a shame to—" Asaamu bites his tongue, again, on the rest on that sentence, _to not have a land of your own. To not be able to grow your forests_. Mithrax is Mithrax, as confusingly open as he is, but he's still Fallen, and they're responsible for enough death in Sol space.

Mithrax surveys him, waiting for the end of the sentence. Asaamu doesn't have one, so he just shakes his head and jams his helmet back on. 

He taps Vega nestled against the side of his neck. "We got a way out of here?"

Without bothering to get up, they project a 3D blueprint into the air between him and Mithrax. 

"You've got options," they say. Two paths light up along the blueprint. "Route A: shorter, but through a lot of service tunnels that don't look like much fun for you pair of beanpoles. Route B: No tunnels, but runs through Hive territory. Orha's last report in marked a clutch at that marker with a wizard brooding over it, and possible acolytes."

They go for the tunnels. Mithrax is bigger all around than Asaamu, but he's much better than him at moving fast hunched over. Asaamu goes first, since it's his Ghost with the map.

The emergency lighting here is limited to dim yellow pools every twenty feet or so, and that's not enough to keep Asaamu from stumbling as his foot hits the edge of a grate sunk further than usual into the flooring.

Mithrax catches him before he goes over but lets go as soon as Asaamu regains his balance, hands opening quick like he's been scalded. Asaamu turns half around to nod his thanks, but neither of them say anything.

They keep going. Mithrax takes the lead as they get closer to the Arcology's massive antechamber, guiding them through a maze of blocked-off storefronts that aren't laid out the same way as in Vega's blueprints. In a stockroom with an actual sign directing them towards the Arcology's entrance, Mithrax freezes. He stands shoulders back, helmet angled to the left, and says something in Eliksni, a quick short phrase. Then he pauses, and speaks again — the cadence of someone talking to someone else over the comms.

Asaamu asks silently, _Vega, how's our communication doing? Storm going down?_

Vega's eye dims briefly as they check. _No. Still nothing, and nothing on the main Eliksni bands either. Your guy's on some other system. Short-range, maybe_.

Mithrax says something else brisk into his pickup, and then his body language changes. He tilts himself towards Asaamu, body and cape shielding him from view of the door.

"We are close enough to my crew that they picked up my signal," he says. He looks… torn, one clawed foot scuffing against the ground, barely missing a floor cleaning drone. After a long pause, he hisses something that might be a sigh into his ether intake filter. "Best you were not here to be found, _o ze_. And you, little Great Machine."

He fishes a communicator out of his mantle and flips a few manual switches. The colours on its small square screen change, shifting from blues to urgent yellows, and he holds it out on an open palm to Vega.

"This channel is personal. Only my Baron uses it. Can you connect to it?"

Vega hovers over his hand. "Got it."

"Good." And Mithrax flips the screen back to blue, tucks the communicator back away, and sweeps out the door. His cape flutters behind him, its hem still dark with wet. Before he turns the corner and out of sight, his arc shield flickers on, pulsing slow and erratic.

Not long after that, on the edge of hearing, Mithrax roars. A ragged chorus of lighter voices answers.

Asaamu turns to Vega in the dim stockroom. Not knowing what to say, or if there are any scouts nearby to hear him if he does speak, he just shrugs, hands up.

 _Weird day, 'Saamu_ , Vega says.

 _You're telling me_.

The cleaning drone bumps at his feet, chiming a bright tone at the impact. 

———-

Off-balance, Asaamu follows the Eliksni crew back to the atrium, ghosting silently behind them. He cuts through hallways and interior courtyards to get back to the one block he has the keys for, and slips through there till he gets back to the balconies. Mithrax's crew have set up a camp on the east side, where the residential blocks intersect and the years of unchecked growth have set the plants up as a screen.

The crew's put up one of their bubble domes, much bigger than the ones Asaamu's seen them use to protect ordnance caches. Titan's windstorm is still screaming overhead, and as he watches, a three-foot-wide piece of Hive shit cracks off from the massive pillar rising from the break in the dome, and bounces off the Eliksni barrier to roll down and crack into pieces on the tile floor.

The shimmering blue of the barrier hides most of what's under it, but Asaamu peers through his scope and spots a taller figure striding through the tiny crowd, gesturing in broad sweeps of its arms.

Asaamu skulks his way across the balconies and makes his way out of the Arcology. The wind's roar rises around him as he makes his way to the platform's surface, and it's a struggle to keep his footing.

No sparrows in this weather, and no transmat. Asaamu makes his way back on foot.

He rides out the rest of the equinox's storm in Sloane's control tower, giving his equipment a much-needed look over and meticulously sharpening every single one of the knives on his person.

He hasn't reported yet about what happened in the Arcology. Not yet. He'll wait to talk to Cayde in person and maybe he'll get some real advice.

Vega is politely very dubious about this.

His fireteam calls him once from a Tower rooftop he thinks he recognizes, a lattice bursting with vines and fish-shaped luck charms secured to the brick wall behind them. Cix holds the pocket communicator, her grown-out roots occupying most of his view till Orha reaches over and tweaks the angle. They chat for a bit, Asaamu getting the gossip update (Vega hangs rapt at his shoulder for that; they missed a lot during the week of the equinox's storms) on both the Guardian and Ghost social scenes. Rust leans sideways into the pickup view during one anecdote, and interrupts the whole conversation by just plucking the communicator out of Cix's hands.

"Sorry, sorry, need a consult, you'll get him back in a minute and then I want to hear about this whole thing with Sauda," she tells Orha and Cix. Asaamu sees Orha raise their hands in outrage, and then his view tilts wildly as Rust slips off the edge of the roof to perch on what might well be a beam of someone's pergola. She sets the communicator down in front of her with a clatter.

"Sometime you'll stop being able to get away with that," Asaamu says, amused despite himself. 

She shrugs. "Sometime's abstract enough for now. What's wrong?"

Then, when Asaamu opens his mouth, she says, "No, something's wrong. What is it?"

"Can I be part of this conversation, or do you want to have it all by yourself, Warlock?"

"Just moving us beyond the preliminaries, Hunter," says Rust tranquilly. The circles under her eyes aren't so deep and dark this week, but there's a tension in her jaw. Asaamu frowns at the communicator.

"Nothing's wrong. There's just some things I'm waiting to talk about till we're all off rotation in the Tower."

For someone who'd managed to avoid noticing Orha's crush on Cix for a solid two years of all their lives and left him to despair about it alone, Rust can be way too sharp. She picks up the communicator to hold it closer to her face, and the sun reflecting off the screen makes her warm yellow eyes flash.

"You treating him like a person, 'Saamu?"

Asaamu grimaces. Then he opens his mouth. Then he closes it again. Then he thumps his head against the cool metal behind him to think. Then he says,

"Trying to. Not easy, when we're both pawns on the board to everyone upstairs. But I am trying."

"Their board, not yours," Rust says. Asaamu can hear the hum of Tower reconstruction in the background of the communicator. Maybe by the time he gets back they'll have reopened the east wall Guardian dorms.

"It's a compelling metaphor, but don't extend it too far," Rust continues. "Your board and moveset are infinite, so don't think too much about those who'd restrict it to a series of squares, alright?"

"Now where'd you get that revolutionary streak?" Asaamu asks, eyebrows going up.

"Long Warlock tradition."

"Yeah, and you've got the hair for it too."

"You've got your Vanguard's sense of humour," she tells him, a grin pulling at her cheeks, and scoops up the communicator.

"Hey, no, before you go back I want to know what's up with you," protests Asaamu. "I already got the rom-com update from its main characters!"

The view on the communicator swoops and blurs, and then it's back to Orha and Cix on the rooftop. Asaamu gets a brief angle of their hands woven together, and smiles despite himself.

As Rust thumps back into a sit, Asaamu's "I'm registering a protest, Warlock," overlaps with her louder "So what was all that with Sauda, then?"

He'll get her to open up next time at the Tower. He'll sit on her if he has to. For now, Asaamu settles back, because his chance is gone for now, and he does, also, really want to hear that gossip.

———-

When the weather clears up enough, Sloane sends him out again. 

"One last patrol-and-pickup mission," she says, before he's shuffled back to Earth for a week for debrief. "Just go scout out and see where the Fallen have dug themselves in now, and bring back any of their tech you can get your hands on. And see where that captain of yours has got to, if he hasn't been shipped out off-moon already."

Asaamu hasn't told her either; all his higher-ups think he hasn't seen Mithrax in a week and more.

He goes, trying not to flee the control room too obviously.

The storms have scrubbed the platforms clean of half a local year's worth of algae and grime, and the air comes through his helmet filter fresher than it has in weeks. Asaamu breathes deep, tucked away in a dark alcove on a watch tower, watching Eliksni movements across three connected platforms.

The Hive are laying low in the day's relatively bright light, but there are enough Eliksni skulking around that Asaamu radios in to Sloane with a warning. They're all in Dusk purple, but from the wary way the squads interact with each other as he watches, a new skiff or even a ketch must have made its way into orbit under cover of the storm.

 _So when are you going to call Mithrax already?_ Vega asks him.

Asaamu puffs out a breath. _Great question, buddy._

He watches one Eliksni squad clear out of a building. They'd been down there for hours, way too long to spend there just for a routine patrol. Worth checking out.

He swings around to the shaded side of the watch tower and makes his way down to the building the Eliksni have just left. This platform is one of the narrow and deep ones, its foundations sunk twenty storeys under the methane sea. Asaamu ghosts down the stairs, boots soundless, shadow skipping over the walls in the uncertain lighting.

The first two floors down are clear, nothing but broken consoles and chairs long ago tipped over. Each floor is taken up with just one wide room, a set of stairs on one side going up and another across going down. The stairwell down to the next floor flickers with a wavering, watery light, and when Asaamu eases his way through a broken automatic door wedged half-open, he sees why: the walls are a patchwork of windows with undersea views, some small, one big enough to take up fully half of the southeastern wall. Each has a tiny panel next to it, blinking green, and there's one console on a stand in the middle of the room, a matching panel on it covered in rows of lights.

Vega materializes above the console to scan it, droning a long note as they do. 

Their scanning beam blinks off, and they say, "Looks like this was where those good old Golden Age engineers tested different alloys for the windows. Guess they were good at their jobs — I don't see a single crack."

"Guess so," Asaamu replies, and leans forward to look through one of the window panels. It's got a streak of bubbles in it, and it makes the misty grey sea look faint, dreamy with distance.

He lingers there for a long minute, and then pulls himself away to descend the next set of stairs.

The next series of floors are that same usual Golden Age combination of wonder and mundanity. Each floor has at least one window somewhere along a wall, and the methane outside gets darker the further down they go. Vega keeps making him stop so they can download old scientific survey logs and then send them back to the main databanks in Sloane's control tower.

"Maybe those Eliksni just came in here for a break," Vega says, when they're on the seventeenth flight down. "There's nothing here but all this data about the methane sea and I have no idea what they'd want with that."

Asaamu nods absentminded agreement, and then exits out onto the floor's main room. Like the third floor, the lighting in here wavers, but this time it's because there's an enormous tank filled with hydrocarbon liquid crowding out everything else in the room, a clear cylinder running horizontally through the entire space, tall enough to almost reach the ceiling. Its ends run through the walls, and it would almost be a tunnel but for the heavy sluice gates at each end cutting it off from the rest of the sea.

And inside the tank, floating sullen in its methane, is a sea monster. It's long, body folded back up on itself, and its snout is long, pointed, and filled with teeth. There's a red-grey cloud in the methane around its jaws.

"You think this is what they wanted?" Asaamu says, stunned. He'd thought sea monsters on Titan were a myth. Everybody but the worst Tower conspiracy theorists thought they were a myth.

Vega flits up to the top of the tank. "There's a porthole up here. Closed now, but definitely forced open not too long ago. What kind of bait did they use to get this thing in here? And _why?_ "

"Great questions," Asaamu says, watching as the monster's huge eye tracks Vega's movement. "Let's go ask them upstairs, huh?"

Vega does a back roll in the air to face Asaamu upside down. "Bad vibes?"

"Real bad vibes," he confirms. Vega blinks their eye in acknowledgment and dematerializes as Asaamu eases back through the door to the stairwell.

The monster, coiled and malevolent, slams its tail into the wall of its tank when Vega disappears. Then it roars, low and eerie and reverberating against the glass.

Asaamu takes the stairs up in bursts, jumping over a dozen steps at a time, shedding electric sparks from his legs as he goes. Two flights up from the tank and the roar comes again. Nine up from that, and the tower shakes around him. It keeps shaking as he climbs, the roar deepening and redoubling.

As he comes out onto the window room of the third floor he sees movement in the room. Keyed up as he is, he's got a knife in each hand ready to throw as he bursts through the door.

He skids to a halt and clutches at his knives convulsively. That's Mithrax on the central podium, peering down at the lights on the board. A whole lot of them are blinking now.

Mithrax turns as his steps echo through the room, arc shield flaring up and then out again as he sees who's standing there.

"What are you doing here?" Asaamu asks. "Did you trap that sea monster in the basement?"

Mithrax steps down from the platform. "What do you know about it?"

He doesn't look friendly right now, shoulders stiff under his mantle and lower arms angled out.

The building shakes again and again. One grate in the floor rattles itself loose of its frame and skitters across the floor.

That roar sounds again, louder, and Asaamu turns reflexively to the windows. He sees a shape, enormous and writhing, without understanding what it is, and then it turns in the methane, and he sees a baleful grey eye, big as a striker's shield.

A monster, like the one in the basement, but ten times its mass. 

The eye narrows as it catches sight of them, and the massive jaws open. It roars again, and twists its body to slam into the windows. Asaamu staggers. Then the monster does it again, and all the lights on the windows' panels go wild, flaring panicked red. The console in the middle of the room wails, and one small window, high on the wall, cracks open. A bucket's worth — a very large bucket's worth — of liquid methane pours out before a new panel slams down over the broken window. 

The monster flicks its enormous tail and dives, passing out of sight.

Asaamu turns to Mithrax to ask another useless question, but it's swallowed by that doubled roar returning, a lighter voice howling in counterpoint to the deep. The building shakes, and keeps shaking, and finally the monster reappears outside the window with the one from the tank twined around its neck.

This time, when the bigger one slams its tail against the wall, all the windows shatter.

The backup panes come down. The sea monster slams itself against the wall again and sends spiderweb cracks running through them.

Asaamu twists around to check the exits. Raising his voice against the cacophony of the room, he calls, "You pissed off its mom; we have to get out of here!"

A massive shattering crash comes from the walls behind him, and then, under the monsters' roar and the wailing of the alarms and the rolling thunder of seawater hitting the ground, Asaamu hears another sound. Something small and choked.

He whirls around. He doesn't see Mithrax at first, his gaze jittering panicked all over the room. Then he spots him — a huddled shape on the ground, cape waterlogged enough to look black. One of the bigger panes has burst open, and Mithrax is surrounded by liquid hydrocarbons and broken glass.

Asaamu gets over to his side so quick it might have been a blink, and drops down next to him. Mithrax looks up, eyes wide and dim. There's dark blood all over his face, and his ether intake mask is a twisted pile of scrap strapped to his face. The batteries strapped to it leak heavy clouds of ether, fogging up the air.

" _Mithrax_ ," Asaamu chokes out, reaching out. Mithrax's torso and legs aren't doing too hot either: there are long splinters of reinforced glass sticking out of half his body. There's a foot-long gash across his stomach, and it looks deep.

Mithrax pushes at the ground under him, trying to get up. He topples back and Asaamu catches him, clutching hard, then immediately tries to gentle his grip. He gets one hand under Mithrax's head, the other under his torso, and props him upright.

"Have to get out," Mithrax wheezes, his eyes flaring once and dimming again as his mask releases a bright plume of ether.

He's right. The water level's rising and Asaamu really doesn't want to take a chance on the two sea monsters stopping now. He shifts his grip and slowly lifts Mithrax, sending Light to his muscles to give him strength. 

"No," says Mithrax, twisting in Asaamu's grip, but Asaamu takes one step and another, and gets them to the stairwell leading up before the level of methane on the floor can overwhelm the drains.

He has a tricky moment maneuvering through the broken stairwell door, having to duck sideways to accommodate Mithrax's horns on one end and his endless legs on the other.

 _That's not going to seal behind us_ , Vega says in his mind, a worried flare.

They're right; Asaamu will have to get them both up to the next floor to get to a watertight seal.

He makes it to the landing halfway up the stairs to the second floor, and then he has to stop. He lays Mithrax propped up against the wall and crouches in front of him.

"Hey, Mithrax? Hey, buddy? I'm gonna need an answer here. Can I do anything for you? Will you be okay?"

He's absolutely babbling. Mithrax turns his face towards Asaamu's with a pained jerk. When he speaks his voice is muffled, mask jammed against his face.

"Ether too concentrated without a filter. Can't heal without it. I will die; you should go."

"Hey, no, hold up, can we fix it, do you have a spare?"

Mithrax shakes his head, four eyes slowly closing. Asaamu's breathing is loud within his helmet, the alarms distant now. 

Asaamu curses under his breath. He looks around. Mithrax looks really bad off. No way to seal the lower door, probably can't get upstairs in time, what other options does he have? 

_Could call for backup,_ Vega says, hushed in his mind. 

_Whose? The backup that wants to kill him or the backup that wants to kill me?_ asks Asaamu in despair. Mithrax's secondaries are clutching his cloak, and Asaamu looks down at him in determination.

He reaches up to unlatch Mithrax's mask. Mithrax shakes his head, stirred to alarm, and Asaamu says, trying to keep his voice soothing, "We're gonna try something. I hope to hell it works."

The latches are all twisted, flattened together. Asaamu keeps his touch as gentle as he can, easing it off piece by piece. He babbles as he works, about his teammates — _you'd like Orha, they've got this way of cocking an eye at the world that's just like you_ — and about Mithrax, _I've been thinking about calling you since the Arcology. You've been sitting on the top of my mind all this time_. 

Asaamu has to wrestle the top pieces of Mithrax's helmet off to get at the back latches on the intake filter. The helmet comes off in three pieces, and reveals the top of Mithrax's head, skin leathery and a deep purple-brown. Asaamu has to worm his hand around to the back of Mithrax's neck to finish unlatching the mask, and finally it comes away. Mithrax's lower face is a mess, covered in cuts from the broken filter and all the window glass, streaked with blood. He pants harsh and exposed in the cold air.

Asaamu takes a last breath himself, and pulls his own helmet off. The cold and humidity are a slap, waking him up, and the ether in the air makes his eyes sting. He fumbles for Mithrax's filter on the ground and unscrews the less-broken-looking ether canister, the one not actively leaking ether from cracks. He slips his thumb over the canister's opening to seal it, brings his lips down to it, and lets a billow of ether enter his mouth, carefully not inhaling.

Mithrax stares at him, eyes fixed on the ether canister. His shoulders keep twitching, slumped one moment and tense up against the wall the next. 

Asaamu settles himself kneeling between Mithrax's sprawled legs. He tilts himself up to reach, presses his mouth to Mithrax's, and pushes the ether into Mithrax's mouth. He breathes it in slowly, shakily.

Anxiously watching, Asaamu straightens with relief when Mithrax's eyes flare brighter for a moment. He dips his head to the canister and repeats the motion, fitting his lips to Mithrax, wrapping a hand around his jaw to hold him in place.

Ether isn't supposed to have any effect on humans but Asaamu feels light, almost dizzy, with an intense awareness of everything touching his skin.

Four breaths of ether in and Mithrax heaves an enormous breath, breaking away from Asaamu to suck in oxygen. His eyes gleam steadily now, and he says, hoarse and disbelieving, "It's working."

Just those two words make Asaamu dizzier, so relieved he has to put a hand out against Mithrax's shoulder to brace himself for a moment. He bends himself back down to the canister and takes another mouthful, the ether burning with cold against his tongue and teeth. This time Mithrax sucks the ether from his mouth, leaving Asaamu gasping. His hand clutches at Mithrax's shoulder, and Mithrax grasps at Asaamu's side, his cloak, his arm, with all four hands.

They manage to arrange themselves into a kind of rhythm, taking a break for a breath of oxygen after each mouthful of ether. Asaamu shuffles himself closer on his knees till he's pressed flush up against Mithrax's long torso, the better to reach him, Asaamu tells himself.

Asaamu is acutely aware of every sensation, his knees against the steel floor, the faint points of Mithrax's claws through his armour, the prickle of Mithrax's teeth every time he pushes their mouths together, the two pillars of Mithrax's knees closing him in on either side. Ether is seeping through his left gauntlet, slowly, where he's trying to keep the bottle sealed between breaths. At the same time, it feels like his consciousness isn't in his head with him, but hovering above — he's in his body and watching it happen all at the same time. _Is this what it's like to be Vega_ , he thinks, shaky, before he registers Mithrax saying something.

"Next we must remove the glass from my wounds."

"Oh. right," Asaamu says. "Can you go without ether till we get them all?"

"We will see," Mithrax says, grim and gravelly and rumbling through Asaamu where their torsos meet.

Asaamu fumbles the canister sealed again by screwing it back into the broken filter, and then turns to the glass. Most of the gashes are beginning to heal, blood drying to scabs, but the areas around the shards are still inflamed.

He looks down at his hands and strips his gauntlets off. They're light as gauntlets go, but they're still too heavy for this kind of detail work. Asaamu pulls out a pair of knives, clean and unused since he last sharpened them, and gets to work picking out the glass.

Bare-handed like this, he can feel the heat of Mithrax's body, the tiny quivers of his muscles as he pulls glass from them.

They have to pause halfway through to give Mithrax more ether. This time, holding the canister sealed with his thumb hurts, his hand aching with the bright cold down to his bones. 

Asaamu takes a mouthful of ether and presses up to Mithrax, the pads of his fingers catching against a rough spot on Mithrax's pauldron as he braces himself. Mithrax raises his primary hands to Asaamu's face, cupping his jaw, claws carding through his hair till they're stopped by the tie holding Asaamu's hair back. He pulls the ether from Asaamu's mouth in a long, steady pull, and when they separate, a few last fumes trickle out from between his sharp teeth, glowing white in the stairwell's unsteady lighting.

When Asaamu tries dipping his head back to the canister, Mithrax stops him with the hands on the sides of his head. He tilts Asaamu's face back up to him, gentle and careful with his claws.

" _O ze_ ," he says, "Little gift. You have proved that name right again. How do you have the strength for it? I would call it the Great Machine's own gift, but your companions don't match you."

Asaamu shivers. The ether is cold, and Mithrax's eyes and hands burn hot against him.

"We've got to get the rest of the glass," he says, ragged.

"Of course," says Mithrax, quiet. But before he lets go, he eases the tie from Asaamu's hair with a clever motion of his blunt hands. Asaamu's hair pours down his back as he bends to cap the canister again and pick up his knives.

Mithrax runs his hands over Asaamu's scalp and through his hair as Asaamu works. Those secondary hands stay locked on to his sides, clenching and loosening with each long splinter worked free.

There are three shards caught in the wound at Mithrax's belly, and each releases a gush of blood as he pulls them out. Fumbling for cloth, Asaamu cleans the wound, and then looks down in dismay to see a corner of his cloak in his hand, dark blood now sunk deep into its blue-green weave.

He lets the feeling go and hunts for another shard to pull out. There's a nasty one in Mithrax's right thigh — he needs to dig for it with the point of his knife, the cut trying its best to heal around it. 

Mithrax shifts under him and Asaamu rubs at his thigh in an attempt to soothe him, long strokes up and down. 

"Almost there," he tells Mithrax.

Mithrax laughs or huffs at that. "Yes," he says.

At some point the roaring from below has stopped. Asaamu will go investigate that later, when he's got brain cells to spare.

After he gets the splinter out of Mithrax's thigh, Asaamu goes hunting for another. He searches with the sensitive pads of his fingers across Mithrax's belly, his thighs, his face where he wasn't protected from the breaking glass by his helmet and filter.

At last, he sits back on his heels. "I think that's all of them," he says, surprised.

Mithrax tips his head down and rumbles, "So it is. I will take some more ether, then, before we make our way up."

It's easy, now, to take a mouthful of ether, to carefully not inhale, to press his mouth to Mithrax's and let Mithrax pull it from him. Mithrax's teeth, fangs really, snag on Asaamu's lip and scrape a drop of blood free. They pull apart, and the ether in the air between them stings cold against it before a faint crackle of Light appears to knit it up again.

"Do that again," Asaamu orders, voice rough. He takes another mouthful of ether and presses himself up against Mithrax, hooking a hand around his neck.

Mithrax does, with enthusiasm. His secondary arms haul Asaamu further up in his lap, and this time when he inhales the ether it leaves Asaamu giddy. 

Mithrax breaks off finally and bends his head down. The mountain of him surrounds Asaamu, enveloping him in cloak and mantle and limbs. He closes his eyes, glowing now a deep voltaic blue, and touches his forehead to Asaamu's. After a moment Asaamu's eyes drift shut too, and he takes a deep breath in through his nose.

They sit there, eyes closed, Asaamu's panic finally passing and leaving room for more light-headedness, more wonder. Mithrax's hand eventually urges the canister up in Asaamu's hand, and Asaamu takes another mouthful to offer Mithrax.

He's pressing his lips up to Mithrax's mouth when the platform alarms abruptly shut off. The silence leaves a ringing in his ears, and Mithrax's inhalation this time is deep with surprise, and pulls all the air from Asaamu's lungs with the ether. He breaks off to gasp, forehead pressed to Mithrax's chestplate, Mithrax's hand carding an apology through his hair.

Then that hand in his hair tenses, and disappears, and Asaamu feel a vibrating scrape as Mithrax yanks the shock sword out of the sheath strapped to Asaamu's back. Then Mithrax is throwing it, and by the time Asaamu turns around in a scramble, it's already found its target: an Eliksni soldier of high middle rank collapsed against the wall of the next landing up, shock sword pinned through his shoulder, a massive cannon fallen at his feet.

Mithrax jerks his head and growls something in Eliksni to the soldier, who nods, eyes wide and frantic behind his mask, and babbles a response.

Mithrax looks down at Asaamu, now facing the same way, back to Mithrax's chest. He gestures outwards, a quick dismissive motion. 

"Scout from another crew thought he would save a captain from the terrible gift-thief. Or he says so. Could have been trying to save the scout from the captain."

Then Mithrax gets up, in a motion just as smooth as he'd been an hour ago, and pulls Asaamu up with him. Then he bends down to scoop up his own twisted, broken filter, with one leaking canister still attached. He tosses it over to the scout with one of his secondary arms, and the scout catches it, fumbling.

Mithrax says something else to him, gesturing to his own jaw and then to the scout's. The scout detaches the canister and screws it into his own filter, trembling. 

Mithrax stoops again to pick up his helmet, in pieces, and Asaamu's, whole. He passes Asaamu's helmet over to him, and then sweeps up the steps. He surveys the scout, and pulls the sword out. It makes a scraping noise as it goes, tearing back through the wall and the scout's body.

He looks over the blade, checking the edge, and without another look at the scout, starts climbing the stairs. Asaamu hurries after him to catch up. 

A flight up, Mithrax passes the blade back over, and Asaamu juggles his helmet to his other arm to slide the sword back into his sheath.

"Thanks. Uh. Should I ask?"

Mithrax looks down at him and slows. "He will heal, and soon. I will not take his life for the sake of his trying to display strength that wasn't his."

"Alright," says Asaamu, still dizzy. Then he says, "I will need my hair tie back, also. Just so you know. I don't have any spares on me today, you can't have that one."

Mithrax makes a face — it's so much easier to read his expressions like this, wow — and slips the tie out of a hidden pocket to hand over, a little green scrap of elasticated fabric.

"So much for your generosity, _o ze_ ," he says, mournful.

Asaamu squints up at him to confirm that's a joke, and grins, lopsided. "Don't scam a Hunter; we came up with that game in this neighbourhood."

He sets his helmet down on a stair and slaps his hair into a messy knot, three quick twists of the tie, and then he can get the helmet back on.

Mithrax keeps the pieces of his own helmet dangling from his fingers. They climb up the last flight of stairs and come out, finally, back into Titan's weak evening light. It's a relief to be above sea level, to only worry about drowning if he trips over the edge of a walkway.

Mithrax, by his side, takes a deep breath. He pulls out his communicator, frowns at it, puts it back away, and holds up his disassembled helmet instead to speak into its pickup. Then he turns, angling his head down to meet Asaamu's eyes with all four of his.

"I will need a replacement filter. And we should confer. Will you come with me?"

He holds out a hand, inviting. Asaamu thinks about it, really thinks about it — he's already spotted two separate Eliksni scouts on the platform here, and there's a tickling presence in the back of his mind that lets him know at least one Guardian is around somewhere. 

If he accepts Mithrax's invitation up to his skiff now, it'll be obvious to everyone watching that it's not under duress. That this Guardian and this Eliksni captain are allied. Even if they're small pieces, it's hard to not picture that chess board, the shifts this this could cause in positioning.

Asaamu feels the weight of the Eliksni sword on his back, and sees his Hunter's throwing knife strapped to Mithrax's lower gauntlet, its sharp edges flashing in the light.

He looks up, squares his shoulders, and gives his hand to Mithrax, bare palm to bare palm.

"Thank you," he says, and lets the transmat take them both.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! 
> 
> The little bit of Eliksni language I used comes from [Sarsion's translations](https://errata.ishtar-collective.net/the-fallen-language/). Title from CRJ's [Making the Most of the Night](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC9aceFjhd4).
> 
>  **update, 6/24:** [clashingshaders on Twitter drew a beautiful illustration for one scene of this fic](https://twitter.com/clashingshaders/status/1010025576692764673); I am in love with it; I will never close the tab I have it open in; please go take a look.


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